


Road of Bones

by ceasetoresist



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Episode s01e09 Anslo Garrick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 01:30:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceasetoresist/pseuds/ceasetoresist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-ep tag for Anslo Garrick Part 1 (1x09). After chasing Garrick and Red to Siberia (and losing them there), Liz finally visits Ressler in the hospital, a visit that turns out to be more therapeutic for her than it is for him. Liz/Ressler friendship. Rating is for some mentions of bloody wounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Road of Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I know this will get Jossed in a few days when Anslo Garrick Part 2 comes out, but I needed a post-ep scene where Liz and Ressler were alive, safe, and together.

There’s an armed guard in an off-the-rack suit at the door to Ressler’s room, tall and blond and All-American-looking, and Liz is so tired that for a second she thinks it actually is Ressler. She does a double take in the hallway, blinking jet lag out of her eyes.

  
“Can I help you, miss?” The guard asks, so she shows him her badge, and he checks her name against a very short list, makes her hand over her service weapon so he can lock it in a flimsy plastic safe. “You can have it back when you leave,” he says, and she nods, flustered, at the very end of her very last nerve. She looks surreptitiously in the direction of her gun. It’s barely been out of her hands the last fifty-six hours, and she feels vulnerable knowing it’s not where it should be.

  
The guard opens the door, and Ressler looks up as she walks in. “Keen?” In the flickering light of the silenced television, his face wears its usual scowl, but as he takes her in—mud-spattered clothes, tangled hair—it softens. “You alright?”

  
Liz exhales a laugh, then breathes it back in. “I’m fine.” She steps closer, walking past the one empty bed to stand in the harsh fluorescent glare of the light over his. “How are you?”

  
“Got an IV full of the good stuff.” He gestures, plastic tubing shifting with the movement. “You look like you could use one yourself.”

  
“You have no idea.” She sinks into the one chair, its hard plastic somehow less comfortable than the Army transport she caught from Sheremetyevo to D.C. A silence stretches out and she is aware, somehow, that he’s giving her time to gather herself. The room is warm and she takes off her coat, throws it over the back of the chair.

  
He reaches for the call button. “You want some water or something? Ginger ale? I can get a nurse.”

  
She stands and puts it back behind his pillow. “Would you relax, Ressler? I’m not going to fall apart.”

  
“Not sure I’m the one who needs to relax here, Keen.”

  
“Jesus Christ.” Frustrated, she grips the bed’s metal railing and finally sees his leg. The wound is neatly bandaged now, but she remembers how it looked when they got the box open, how the box smelled like burnt blood, how Ressler’s eyes rolled back in his head when he saw her. “Everybody else is trying to kill us, do we need to be at each other’s throats?”

  
He raises an eyebrow. “Garrick I know about. Who else is trying to kill you now?”

  
So she pulls the chair closer to the bedside and tells him the whole ridiculous tale, sparing no details. There is some catharsis in it, she realizes, halfway through, feeling her body’s tension unspool in the quiet warmth of the room, in the full focus of his attention. He has a lot of questions, and she answers them as best as she can.

  
“You came here right from Moscow?”

  
“Yes. Every lead we had in Siberia turned out to be a dead end. Not that there were that many leads anyway.”

  
“And we can’t get a signal on Red’s chip?”

  
 _We._ As if he’s still on the team, as if he won’t be out of work for weeks if not months. “No. I’m sure he had it removed. He must have a doctor he trusts in Yakutsk.”

  
“His Russian isn’t that great and his Yakut is even worse. We need to find all the medical professionals in Yakutsk who speak English or one of Red’s other languages.” Ressler looks around, drags the rolling side table closer, the ice chips in his plastic cup rattling.

  
Liz recognizes the look on his face and hands him a notepad and pen from her purse, chagrined. She presses the release button and lowers the railing, too tired to care that he notices that she does it with the ease of long practice. She pushes the table closer so he can write, careful of all of the contraptions at work on his leg. “How are you going to get through not being able to work?”

  
He snorts. “I’m working right now, aren’t I?” His angle is bad for writing, and he grabs for the triangle-shaped gripper hanging over the bed, using the strength of both arms to pull himself into an upright position. “Physical therapy starts Monday. The Bureau’s bringing over a secure hotspot for me tomorrow, and I’ll be back in the office before Cooper even notices I’m gone.”

  
Liz knows Cooper rode with Ressler in the ambulance from the post office, that Cooper waited through the hours of surgery it took to put Ressler’s leg back together, that Cooper waited here in this very chair for Ressler to wake up. She got Cooper’s text on her work phone as she and Malik rattled over the Road of Bones in the back of an old Soviet Jeep, three words that surprised her with how they made her throat tighten, her eyes water: _He’ll be OK._

  
She sighs and lets her hair out of its days-old ponytail. She hasn’t been home yet, to see Tom, to let Hudson smell all the exotic places she’s been, to let go of the adrenalin that’s saved her life three times in the past two days and just sleep.

  
Ressler is writing, the IV needles getting in his way. After a minute or two he also sighs, giving up and resting back against the pillows, looking past her at the bank of windows. Unstyled, his hair falls over his forehead, and Liz resists the urge to push it out of his eyes and into its usual position. As if that would speed his recovery. As if that would get things back to the way they used to be.

  
“I never thought Garrick and Reddington would work together ever again,” Ressler says. “Not after Red shot him. Garrick was out of commission for years. He dropped off our radar completely. Even the CIA lost him.”

  
“Meera mentioned that.”

  
“How did you get the okay to go to Siberia with her?”

  
“The same way you got the okay to go to Munich: I was retrieving an asset.”

  
Ressler laughs bitterly. “It feels like ten minutes ago I was in that beer hall with Reddington.”

  
“It must feel like five minutes ago he gave you that field transfusion.”

  
Ressler shifts against the pillows uncomfortably. Maybe the stuff in the IV isn’t as strong as she’d like to believe: his mouth narrows, his hands fist in the sheets. “Can you turn that drip up?” Liz asks.

  
“I don’t want to. I need to be clear-headed.”

  
“For what, so you can choose between the red Jello and the blue when they bring around the dinner menu?”

  
He laughs again, and it seems less ironic this time. “You can stand down, Keen, I’m not going to run away any time soon.”

  
“Oh believe me, I know that.” Her memory flashes back to the box, to the gunpowder and tension in the air, all of them stunned at Garrick and Reddington’s escape and the destruction left in its wake. She’d slipped in Luli’s blood outside the box and then in Ressler’s inside it. She’d bent to check his pulse and his eyes had focused on hers in the split second before he’d passed out. It had seemed an unlikely thing for Red to do, to leave a mess behind, to abandon someone he'd worked so hard to save, but now that she's been abandoned, too, Liz can understand it better. Now she rests her elbows on the bed and tips her forehead into her linked hands, sighing mightily.

  
Minutes pass in silence. She can hear the electrical ticks of the room’s equipment, the hum of the lights. For the first time in four days she is in a safe place and not moving, and the baseboard behind her is putting out intense warmth. Outside it is snowing, there is a long drive home and a husband with questions she can’t answer. She can hear Ressler’s steady breathing.

  
When Liz wakes, Ressler has put the TV back on. It’s some nature show with the sound off, predators and their prey swimming endlessly in blue darkness. His eyes are closed but she can’t tell if he’s asleep or just waiting, just a shark who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t rest, doesn’t dream. There are no flowers or cards in the room, no signs of any visitors. She blinks herself awake, suddenly aware that she’s in his personal space.

  
He must be asleep, because he doesn’t move when she does, doesn’t react when she turns on her personal phone’s screen to check the time. There are half a dozen voicemails from Tom, and she deletes them in one fell swoop, unlistened. She can guess at what they all say. Liz shrugs into her coat, her back stiff from sleeping hunched over the side of the bed. It’s late, so late. She feels roughly one million years old.

  
As she is heading for the door she hears him, his low voice edged in pain: “Keen. Thank you for coming. I—it’s good to see you.”

  
“Good to see you too.” Her heart hammers away in her chest until she is done signing out with the guard, until her service weapon is resting in its rightful place at her hip. It is only when she is on the deserted freeway, smashing snowflakes to bits at seventy-five miles an hour, that she lets herself cry.


End file.
